Arab leaders use varying tactics to try to calm anger in the streets

Amid deepening protests in the past few days, the Libyan government's grip on Benghazi, the second-largest city, appeared to be slipping. Security forces there opened fire on mourners attending funeral marches for 84 protesters killed the day before, their harshest response yet to the recent round of demonstrations. They also swiftly clamped down on smaller uprisings that spread to the outskirts of the capital, Tripoli, where protesters seized military bases and weapons. The outbreak of protests there signaled a new threat to the regime.

Protests also broke out Sunday in Morocco and Tunisia, posing new challenges to their rulers, while authorities in Iran and Bahrain continued to confront calls for reform.

By late Sunday, the number of those killed in the uprising across Libya had soared to at least 233, most of them in Benghazi, according to Human Rights Watch. Other news reports placed the death toll at 200 or much higher.

U.S. and European Union officials on Sunday condemned Libya's crackdown and called for an end to the violence. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the United States is "gravely concerned" and has received "multiple credible reports that hundreds of people have been killed and injured." Many of the victims had been killed with machine guns, witnesses said.

The scope of the turmoil in Libya is impossible to verify. Authorities have denied access to foreign journalists and have periodically cut off the Internet and phone lines. But the unfolding situation in Libya could mark the most brutal attempt to suppress the anti-government protests sweeping across the Arab world.

Residents and activists describe a volatile landscape that is increasingly isolated from the world and becoming bloodier and more chaotic by the day. The protesters seek the ouster of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, who has ruled for more than four decades.

Gaddafi's son appeared on state television early Monday, saying his father is in the country and backed by the army. "We will fight to the last minute, until the last bullet," Seif al-Islam Gaddafi said, warning that if the unrest continues, the country could become engulfed in civil war and Libya's oil wealth "will be burned."

Gaddafi's regime also appeared to suffer its first defection Sunday when the country's representative to the Arab League said he had resigned his position, angry about the government's harsh tactics in Benghazi.

"Things are getting progressively worse in western Libya," said one Tripoli resident who spoke via messaging on Skype. "Internet is extremely slow and Web browsing is turned off most of the time. We can't make international calls anymore." The resident added that text messaging "doesn't seem to work either."

Renewed calls for talks

In Iran, security forces on Sunday violently put down attempted pro-democracy demonstrations in Tehran and other cities. But elsewhere in the Middle East, besieged autocrats tried to offer olive branches after violent tactics failed to suppress the anger on their streets and the demands for them to resign.

In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has ruled this impoverished country for 32 years, renewed his call for political dialogue with the nation's main opposition parties, an approach that could lead to a power-sharing deal. The move followed the deaths of at least five protesters and dozens of injuries in nine straight days of demonstrations, which included clashes between security forces and protesters in the capital and in the southern cities of Taiz and Aden.